


A Hundred Challenging Things a Boy Can Do

by BlindtoDreams



Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, Drama, Eventual Smut, Family Drama, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 22:54:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindtoDreams/pseuds/BlindtoDreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Blaine's family relocates to California during senior year, Kurt nurses the sting of his heartbreak with the help of an unlikely supporter - his former tormentor, Dave Karofsky. It's a surprise to the both of them when they fall head-first into a relationship from there, but not nearly so shocking as the dismayed reactions from Kurt's friends and family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dating David Karofsky was the last thing Kurt had on his mind when he picked up the phone that night, five weeks after Blaine’s family moved to California.

The few interactions they’d had following Kurt’s return to McKinley High were tense at best, but he couldn’t help regarding the troubled boy with a kind of malnourished affection. He could resist offering support to him even less. David needed a friend, and Kurt knew the feeling.

He allied with him for a thousand reasons. Dave hurt – he hurt so hard it led him to hurting others. Kurt couldn’t relate to _that_ , not in its specifics, so it became fascinating to him. A study in the psychology of another young gay man in Lima. He was intrigued by Dave's confounding self-destruction. Amused by his brute wit. Endeared by the way he tried to hide in so unmistakable and hefty a body. He became protective of David even before he’d fully forgiven him. A glimpse of him in the hallways would prompt both the familiar flush of fear and a belly-churning interest.

He allied with him because he was the only one there to _do_ it. Santana had a peculiar kind of compassion, but she doled it out in such stringent amounts and to such a selective crowd that it left Dave a used man after their brief relationship. She’d cut him loose when the purpose was served, never equating her fear and frustration with his, never seeing past what his problems could afford her, never empathizing.

But he allied with him, most of all, because he suffered regressions once in a while. Not against _Kurt_ , barring one heated exchange in the second week of summer, but against other people, and against himself.

Even as he settled into self-acceptance, Dave still wrestled with an issue Kurt didn't understand, and therefore couldn’t advise him on: the current of violence that slumbered under the surface of his anger. Dave retained a bit of his youth’s ego even after coming out to his family, and all the easy triggers that were buried in that ego stayed a part of him, followed him into any situation that made him emotional. When frustrated he would snap, shove someone smaller than him, pick a fight with his friends, or yell when the conversation didn’t warrant it.

Kurt seemed nearly exempt from all but the more verbal of his tantrums, so he became the person Dave trusted when he needed to discuss them. He had little to say about being gay once he’d recognized it as the truth, but the inability to control himself when he was upset wasn’t something that became less troublesome after being able to give it a name, as being gay eventually did.

At first, Kurt encouraged him to talk to counselors, to his father, to a therapist – someone qualified to comment on human behavior or who knew him intimately, but Dave was more comfortable on the phone with Kurt.

Eventually those conversations, safe and quiet, with a person he’d grown to trust, gave Dave something all his own to rely on, something private that positively impacted the way he handled stress.

Progress was slow in the going, but Kurt, too, developed an appreciation for their unique rapport. It warmed him to be needed. It was too one-sided to call friendship, but too deep to be nothing at all.

That’s what compelled him to call Dave that day, he supposed, just after turning down another invitation to join the family at a movie.  
  
Five weeks after saying goodbye to Blaine, he sat with his knees drawn tight to his chest in the living room of an empty house, waited for Dave’s voice to greet him on the other end of the line, then cried himself half-sick between repetitions of the same words, again and again, “ _I want him back, Dave. I want him back so much_.” 

After more than a month without him, the distinction between his relationship with Blaine and his relationship with friends and family was becoming more obvious. They tried to be patient with a heartbroken kid, but it wasn’t their heartbreak to bear, and patience was wearing thin. They didn’t see the same profound loss that he saw, they didn’t see that he’d lost anything but a high school romance. They wanted him out of the house again, in their company and laughing. He didn’t feel like laughing. He hadn’t felt like laughing since Blaine’s parents sat the two of them down in early August to ‘discuss’ the inevitable.

Aaron Anderson was being promoted. The family would relocate to California and that’s where Blaine would go to college.  Their plans to be together in New York after graduation were dismantled – he could live wherever he wanted, they said, so long as he paid his own way. If he wanted _their_ money, he’d be living at home; it was in this twisted application of guilt that they showed their love for him.

The boys both agreed that choosing a relationship over his education would be a disaster – they could never afford it, not in New York. Would Blaine bury himself in student loans and a part-time job while Kurt carelessly enjoyed a complete semester at the school of his dreams with the help of a college fund?  Would Kurt forgo his dreams altogether in order to help the two of them stay on top of mounting bills through whatever careers they could find that didn’t require a college degree?

All options would lead to the same ugly end – resentment, pressure, the dissolution of love.

They indulged each other with wild fantasies and hopeful schemes to see a positive outcome, but the thirty-day moving date approached as fast and relentlessly as a death sentence. It was decided that the relationship would end when Blaine left. They spent their last few weeks together withdrawn from all others, waiting, committing each other to memory.

Kurt’s focus for most of the phone call to Dave was saying goodbye to Blaine at the airport. He wasn’t used to seeing Blaine cry. His eyes would shine, sure, especially during a sad movie or an intense moment between them; his emotions were easy to spot. But he never broke, not like that. He broke in the airport.  He cried, cried hard enough to _hear_ it, and it overwhelmed Kurt with the urge to hold him, hush him, piece him back together. It was the first time he’d seen Blaine so upset, it would be the last time he saw him at all, and he was helpless, unable to offer any comfort; their last moment in each other’s arms was one of his first complete failure as a boyfriend. Then, he wasn’t a boyfriend anymore.

That’s what he told Dave through the separation of their cell phones five weeks after the fact, but it wouldn't be the last time the topic came up.

In the season that followed, in the countless calls and visits that came of his unexpected breakdown, Kurt confessed things to Dave that reminded him of what he was missing, the urges to send Blaine letters or change his plans and head west after graduating, the wish that they’d broken up over something hurtful and messy so that he could tell himself he was better off. He talked about the future as if in mourning; the apartment they’d decorated together in their imaginations, Indian food delivered to their doorstep at 3:00 in the morning while they studied, auditioning for roles and cheering each other at every performance, no matter how trivial.

He shared it all obsessively, but exclusively, with Dave, because by the time he was ready to stop talking about it, Blaine had been gone for months already, and Dave was the only one left still willing to listen.

The result was that Kurt needed Dave's help nearly as often as Dave needed _his_. It stopped being so ambiguous, it stopped being so one-sided. They were friends.Dave coaxed him back to happiness, drew him step-by-step out of heartbreak, and Kurt remained the steadying force that prevented Dave’s temper from going unchecked.

After the balance was struck, they started to laugh.

The shift in their dynamic was startling. Dave’s confidence grew when Kurt relied on him. He no longer felt that he was making Kurt shoulder an unfair burden; It was reciprocal, now. They helped each other. Meanwhile, Kurt lost the gray, miserable weariness around his eyes and rejoined his family when they asked for his company.

And the time they spent together, just the two of them, became less formal – it went from arrangements made by phone to spontaneous, instinctive visits to the same place every day or so. Somehow, Kurt found himself convinced into a bowling alley arcade on a regular basis.

They would see a movie that was obviously awful, argue over which magazines were the better purchase at Barnes & Noble, or eat somewhere just a little too expensive to make sense (a tradition developed between them of choosing each other’s meals, with the other party having no input - at first an attempt to psych the other out with strange combinations, then later, a subtle way of proving they knew one another well enough to be trusted with the task).

By the time it happened, a few months later, that Kurt was noticing their perfected chemistry, it was as if they’d been dating for years.

Senior year passed its mid-point slowly. Students were already sluggish and yearning for summer, growing bored of social status and terrified of the future. Glee Club lacked battles for the spotlight and relationship tension was at an all-time low.  Though friends were surprised to see Kurt and Dave meeting up on the stairs outside each morning and chattering excitedly together down the halls between classes, no one pressed the issue. They were too tired, too nervous, too preoccupied.

Without something scandalous to look forward to, Kurt might’ve grown downright despondent.

Three weekends after their return from winter break, an excuse to misbehave presented itself in the form of the season’s first party.

Kurt didn’t know the “host,” a football player who’d transferred in the middle of last year, but Dave did, and so did Quinn, who’d started a tentative relationship with him over Christmas. She was gun-shy about forming attachments to athletes by now, but he seemed to  have limited ambition for popularity – just a large house and a stocked liquor cabinet and one of those personalities suited to leaning back in a recliner and watching the people he loved have a good time.

So it happened, quite abnormally, that a handful of Glee kids wound up at a party full of jocks, Quinn with her lover, Brittany and Santana with each other, Finn on his own and Kurt with Dave, as a friend.

After Rachel’s awkward get-together some time ago, Kurt’s interest in parties was almost purely entertainment-based. He liked to watch, cheekily cheer on fights that broke out, and see if anybody left with the same people they showed up with. This time, however, Dave’s relaxed influence was a hand at his shoulder prompting _new_ behaviors.

They met in the driveway. Dave smiled at him instantly.

“Look at you! Jeans! I expected, I don’t know, something with wool. I’m so proud.”

Kurt jabbed at Dave’s arm with a closed fist. “I own jeans.”

“ _Fancy_ jeans. You own capris and shit. Not jeans like that. Come on, admit it – you bought them before you came over.”

A moment’s hesitation decided for Kurt to say nothing more on the subject than, “Shut up,” annoyed at being so keenly predicted.

To be fair, Dave wasn’t typically dressed, either. He’d secured a slender tie around the collar of a short-sleeved button-up, black with faint silver stripes of thread. Jeans. They’d inadvertently showed up in similar outfits. Kurt wouldn’t mock him for it now – too easy. He’d wait. He’d wait until Dave tried to deny he had a fashion sense when he was on a testosterone binge.

Inside, music thudded dully from a stereo system in the living room, but the order appeared to be leading guests to the kitchen, first. Kurt knew even before they got there that it was to huddle like vultures around the counter waiting for alcohol of indeterminate nature to be handed off in little red cups, but he had no intention of partaking.

Not until Dave did.

His movement through the house and around a keg (a gift from someone’s older sister) was discomfiting in its attractiveness. Kurt had long been aware of an appreciation for men like his father, as cliché and discredited as the theory was, and watching Dave fill a cup as though he’d done it a thousand times before while laughing at a quip from a nearby friend was at once provocative and familiar.

Kurt _wanted_ to be that casual, to be that confidently natural, so he followed close behind and mimicked Dave in his footsteps.

Dave laughed again, jovial and loud.

“No way,” he said, pointing his cup at Kurt with two fingers aimed at him. “No way you’re gonna surprise me twice in one night; what are you doing?”

Kurt postured himself to scoff with a hip out and one hand holding his freshly poured beer (with perhaps just a bit too much foam at the top). 

“Are you under the impression I can’t drink a beer just as easily as you can?” The challenge in his voice was faint but clear, a welcome. _Test me._

Dave relented, almost as fatherly in his well-wishing  as he was in his demeanor, and lifted his cup in salute.

“Cheers, then.”

They drank at the same time. Dave took it naturally, Kurt disguised a grimace. The stuff was precisely as nasty as he remembered it being.

A silent smile passed between them, then, and they were back where they began; Dave listening to a pal half-gone on tequila, Kurt watching him with probing, inquisitive eyes.

Comfort came fast and without having to struggle, for Kurt, as the crowd was a satisfying blend of excited voices and music, everyone in their own space, each adhering to his or her own rhythm. These were the sorts of parties he appreciated. He could be anonymous without drawing attention, an observer.

As with so many things, that comfort turned out to be temporary.

From Dave’s left came an elbow, jabbing into his ribcage, then a stabbed cough of, “ _Hey_ ,” to pull him from his conversation.

“So you two, like, friends now?” The voice collected Kurt into the scenario with a gesture.

Kurt didn’t know the voice, but that didn’t mean he’d never heard it before. He took a breath and held it in, curious but concerned, over how Dave would handle the tone of judgment in front of so many of his schoolmates.

This hadn’t happened yet. They’d prepared for it, but it hadn’t happened yet. All of those panicked, hopeless, terrified phone calls might prove a wasted effort.

And it wasn’t as if Kurt were standing near an ally, either. The few friends he knew would be here might’ve been late arriving or lost in conversation elsewhere, and the stranger-in-a-strange-land inconvenience was suddenly glaring. If the judgmental newcomer was persistent, turned his attention exclusively to Kurt or, less likely, if Dave regressed, he would’ve felt more secure having someone on his side, someone he could turn to instantly for support.

Instead, he waited, alone, for the punch line.

Just as tensions between couples seemed rarer, these days, so did those between Glee Club and the rest of the student body. Senior year was a time for college applications, struggles with grades, and after-school jobs – it was as if the social hierarchy had been half-forgotten in favor of preparing for a world nobody understood, but knew enough to worry about.

Still, there’d been the uncomfortable run-in, a slur called out, a name shouted, a threat made, and even when it seemed students were too tired to trouble themselves with being physical, it would’ve been difficult to pretend that acceptance had settled on the shoulders of the McKinley student body (or the families that were raising them).

Dave’s reply, however, was simple.

“That a problem?”

The boy, whose name Kurt would later learn was Scott, only shrugged in reply. Dave’s resolve to the matter seemed to have stilled the urge in him to make waves – if he wasn’t going to turn red in the face or say something ugly to downplay the association, there was little entertainment to be had.  

Kurt couldn’t help himself. His hand reached out on instinct and curled in a reassuring fist on Dave’s forearm; he was proud of him.

They shared a glance, heavy, weighted, full of words, then spent the rest of the evening in loose orbit, adrift on the periphery of the other’s vision.

Numerous drinks and conversations with late-arriving friends were had before they were near enough to speak again without another body crowded between them. Groups of students were scattered around the living room and kitchen, some spilling onto the patio, others disappearing upstairs or breaking off to dance in giggling twosomes.

Quinn and the man of the moment were among the latter category, swaying in harmony to a plaintive, acoustic ballad, her face propped on his shoulder. She was mouthing the lyrics – it wasn’t a song Kurt would’ve expected her to know.

He and Dave hovered near the fireplace, by now bearing forgotten bottles and plastic party cups, reaching for sentences and dropping them again. They’d been straining to bridge that insignificant distance all evening, and now that they had, neither could admit the want any easier than they could explain it.

Kurt broke first.

“I was really proud of you back there.”

“You don’t say.” Sarcasm, but passive. Pleasant.

“Next, we teach you how to take a compliment.”

The taller boy’s expression suddenly squirmed with conflict. He tried to speak in jerks and stumbles, landing eventually at, “I need you to know that it wasn’t for you,” which dismayed him even as he said it.

“Noted,” Kurt answered stiffly. It wasn’t quite the meaningful comment he’d hoped to hear.

“That didn’t come out right,” Dave amended with a clumsy tongue, wrestling words that wouldn’t sit still. He knew it was important to say, and important to say correctly, but tact wasn’t a popular weapon in his social arsenal. “I just mean, you know, that it wasn’t for show. I didn’t just say it because you were watching.”

A brief relaxing of the newly-tensed muscles in Kurt’s dictatorial brow assured Dave that he was headed in the right direction, so he pressed on, a little more quietly, a little closer to Kurt’s ear.

“I don’t care what those guys think, that’s all. I used to, more than anything, it was almost like I cared more about that than – you know, than I did about me. It came really easily. But now, this does. Hanging with you – with whoever, and being comfortable. That’s what I meant. And I know a lot of that is because of you. But it’s not _for_ you. Does that make sense?”

By demeanor it was clear Kurt understood. The chill in his eye was gone, and his shoulders relaxed from their brace for argument. But he still didn’t speak, and Dave’s question went unanswered for a long, tight moment.

Kurt watched him, watched the relief of confession fall from him, watched nervousness creep along in its place, watched curiosity come quickly behind, and it was all in silence, studying, processing.

“You okay?”

Music nearly drowned out Kurt’s reply.  It bobbed just above the surface, just high enough for Dave to hear. “You still owe me a dance.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Inspired to action by Dave’s utter lack and impatient about being obeyed, Kurt lifted his hand for Dave to take, then repeated, “You owe me a dance.”

“You’re serious.” Disbelief twisted the skinny line of his eyebrows.

The jilted hand flicked a gesture at Dave, but Kurt’s lips refused to move. He was stubbornly resigned to silence until he got what he wanted. He wouldn’t say it a third time. Dave was going to dance with him. That’s what would happen next.

Dave's hesitation had nothing to do with the small crowd of their schoolmates, but everything to do with the change in tide between the two of them, his a steady, pondering sweep across the sand, Kurt’s a little more turbulent, different with every crash to shore.

But it was temporary hesitation nonetheless, and he didn’t have to check for prying eyes before he finally accepted the invitation, mingled their fingers together and obliged Kurt in a moment they should’ve shared the year before.

Kurt had a way of presenting himself when he was vulnerable. Other men watched their feet when they felt shy, or let their eyes dance off to a spot on the wall. Not him. He bored into Dave with a gaze that was relentless, unflinching, mustering all the pretended courage he had.

 It was Dave who glanced, just once, to the floor, to the slow slide of their shoes on the carpet, intimidated by the alien resolve he saw in Kurt; it was uncomfortable not to know what he was thinking. Clearly, whatever he found looking down was even less comfortable. His focus was back on Kurt in an instant, Kurt who was daring him, silently, not to let it happen again, not to break their bond apart, not to fail.

It wasn’t the shock he expected when Kurt kissed him. He sank into it as if he’d been holding his breath since Kurt pushed him away in the locker room a year ago, and now he could breathe again. He _did_ breathe, he breathed, panted through his nostrils with utter satisfaction, mouth occupied in a tangle of tongues and accommodating Kurt’s tiny chin against his own.

There were a thousand things about that moment Kurt wanted to commit to memory. He spread his fingers, thin and knife-like, across Dave’s shoulders, up his neck, into the hair that clung close to his scalp; he wanted to remember the bristle of resistance there. They drank different things – Dave was consistent with beer, Kurt had switched an hour ago to vodka in orange soda. The flavors clashed in their mouths; he wanted to remember the result, the bitter, metallic tang of Dave’s tongue on his, the hot pant of breath and fumes of liquor that passed between them.

And Dave’s _hands,_ he wanted to remember those, too, and how this was the first time since they’d been at war with one another that he could comfortably take note of his size, how much larger he seemed when those hands left Kurt’s hip and flattened against his back, yanked him in and held one boy to the other.

It could’ve happened anywhere, but it happened right there. It happened in front of Quinn, whose dance had come to a halt. It happened in front of Santana, who saw it on her way back from the bathroom, but kept walking, and it happened, quite by accident, in front of Finn, who instantly turned to leave.

It happened there, in the middle of a room full of familiar faces, a kiss between them that neither had to hide.


	2. Chapter 2

A low tide of gossip washed across his social circle the following Monday. Kurt ignored it, Dave combated it with casual humor, and the Glee Club ingested it like a bad wine.  
  
Rachel was the first to spit it back up, pulling Kurt to the side of the room the minute he showed up for practice. Her eyebrows were high on her head, face twisted, practically burning with concern. Her words were reasonable, her tone was not.  
  
“I thought I would do you the courtesy of coming to you first, before accepting such an unbelievably heinous rumor, so, here I am. Is it true?”  
  
The trouble with Rachel was that she’d studied her expressions for so long, preparing for a life inside the lens, that you could never tell when she was acting and when she wasn’t. She approached everything with such sincerity that Kurt had to suspect otherwise by default, to avoid being suckered.  
  
“I’m as devastated as you are,” he answered, pushing past the scene of the confrontation to sit but followed closely by her skittering footsteps. “Al Gore was trying to tell us all along, but my loyalty to aerosol products was greater than my loyalty to the environment.”  
  
“Tell me,” she demanded, catching up as he chose a seat and planting herself solidly in the chair beside him. “Did you kiss him?”  
  
He wasn’t about to be shamed into silence by Rachel Berry. For god’s sake, the girl was wearing saddle shoes. “I did.”  
  
Rachel’s lips hung just a few centimeters apart, processing the shock, processing Kurt’s casual admission. “I don’t understand. Are you two _actually_ dating? After what he did to you?”  
  
He was torn between his obstinate need not to conceal what he’d done and his resistance to the idea of answering to Rachel, but truth won out in the end. “Yes. The how and why aren’t any of your business.”  
  
“What about Blaine?” Her voice was a high, quiet whine of earnest confusion, but it made Kurt’s eyes darken at the edges, mouth set firmly into a frown.  
  
“What _about_ Blaine?”  
  
“Have you told him?”  
  
With a tone he hoped would suggest finality, Kurt turned his face away from her, crossed one leg over the other, and said, “We agreed not to speak after the move. That’s also a valid option for you and I, by the way.”  
  
Sadly, Rachel could not be deterred by sass.  
  
A noticeable drop in pitch brought her worry to a low simmer, more easily digested. “Look, I’m not trying to pry for the sake of prying, Kurt; this is a _big_ deal! I just – I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m worried about you.”  
  
He wanted to soften, too, like she did. It would’ve felt more comfortable to talk to her like the friend she’d become. But the mention of Blaine, the shove she gave his name back to the foreground of Kurt’s still-sore memory, it hardened him out of character, and he resisted giving in to tenderness.  
  
He insisted with dreamy indifference, “Well, I’m fine, so you’ll have to find another melodrama to star in.”  
  
It was as far as he intended to let the conversation go. He said nothing else that invited her input, not then, not for the rest of the hour.  
  
Though Rachel’s fretful judgment was the first confrontation he had about his new relationship with Dave, it most certainly wasn’t the last.  
  
At first, they happened sporadically, with long stretches of peace in between. Quinn came days after Rachel. She was banking on those three weeks in early summer when they accidentally connected – she’d been lonely, single and sad, and not many of her “actual” friends knew how to work with compassion. She must’ve thought she could repay the favor, now, by getting the scoop on his new relationship.  
  
Not a success.  
  
Then it was Sam the following Friday. He seemed to think the phrase “man-to-man” would make a difference.  
  
It didn’t.  
  
Then it was Finn’s turn.  
  
First, he confessed that he’d been giving Kurt the “silent treatment” since the party, so great was his offense at finding out there rather than being directly confided in. Kurt hadn’t noticed, but decided better of saying so.  
  
“Not cool, man,” Finn concluded, standing a foot from Kurt’s locker not two days after Sam’s effort in the exact same spot.  
  
And Kurt attempted the same breezy lack of commitment to the conversation that he’d tried on Sam, that he’d tried on everyone else, but the longer he wore that mask the less comfortable it became. His patience was in a rapid state of decay. "You'll recover."  
  
Finn was persistent, leaning closer with every appeal as if proximity would make his position more sensible.

“We’re supposed to be family, Kurt. We tell each other things like this.”  
  
With a severe focus on the exchange of his books from locker to bag that was wholly unnecessary except to keep him calm, Kurt snorted back a laugh and answered, “When was the last time you hit me up for dating advice?”  
  
“That’s different.”  
  
“It’s different? Two months ago when you were convinced Rachel was going to leave you for the _Sparklett’s guy_ that restocks the teacher’s lounge, who did you talk to? Puck – who told everyone, I might add.”  
  
Finn’s eyes hit the floor, hiding from the judgment – in retrospect, his panic over that situation had turned out to be more than a little misguided.  
  
“And when you realized you wanted to break up with Quinn last year, refresh my memory, was it dad that you went to, or me? Face it, Finn, we don’t ‘share’ things with each other. Don’t try to use being a member of the family against me.” Three fingers guided the locker shut, and he concluded, “It won’t work,” before turning on his heel to leave.  
  
“Fine,” Finn volleyed back. But he wasn’t ready to give up. He matched pace with Kurt and argued,  “Fine, we don’t share things with each other, but maybe we should. Starting with this.”  
  
“I’m not in a sharing mood.”  
  
“It’s obvious why!” The lift of his voice alerted a handful of passing students to the altercation. Kurt watched them take in the boys’ faces, absorb them, then continue walking. The look he punished Finn with was enough, he hoped, to express his displeasure, and make Finn reign himself back in. The last thing Kurt wanted was a scene to propel the rumor mill.  
  
But quieting down did not mean retreating. Instead, Finn became more aggressive, as if to balance the loss of volume with smarter attacks.  
  
“Look, I’m just saying – I think the reason you don’t want to talk to anybody about this is that you know how messed up it is.”  
  
“I don’t want to talk to anybody about this because it isn’t any of their business, and none of you would _listen_ if I did. You’ve made up your minds, I’m not going to try to change them.”  
  
Finn skipped over the accusation, and Kurt couldn’t help privately but celebrate being proven right.  
  
“Have you told your dad yet? Does he know?”  
  
“We don’t tell each other everything, he’ll know when he needs to know. It hasn’t come up.”  
  
“You’re keeping it from him,” Finn pressed. “You know he’d lose it.”  
  
“I’ll be late for class.”  
  
Finn’s frustration manifested itself in gestures that damned his own impotence. As frightened as he was of the responsibility of leading people, not being listened to stuck in him like a splinter. “Kurt, listen—“  
  
“ _I’ll be late for class_.” If his tone hadn’t stamped the encounter shut, the over-reaching steps he took that tangled him into a swarm of students would have.  
  
He didn’t want to give Finn the credit of being the one who finally broke him down. That couldn’t have been it, the thing that knotted up in him during American Government and made it impossible to focus.  
  
Finn was as misguided as everyone else, after all, and he hadn’t brought up a thing that Kurt couldn’t argue.  
  
Except one. Burt's opinion. Using his dad against him had agitated the insult of being questioned in the first place. He spent most of the period distracted and tense, wanting to know why he’d retreated, why he didn’t have an answer for that.

Eventually he turned the gloom outward, projected it back where it belonged – on everyone involving themselves in his love life – and decided (not for the first time) that Finn was simply an idiot. Burt was a reasonable person, and there was no reason to worry about telling him. He just didn't want to, not yet.  
  
The fault was with his classmates, not with him, not with his father.

It was as if each of his friends met privately to encourage each other, tempering their nerves for the moment they’d eventually ask the same tired question, “ _What are you thinking_?”  
  
He’d expecte _ _d shock, of course__ , but he hadn’t thought for a minute that he would meet outright resistance, and it was changing the dynamic around him. He didn’t want to spend his last year with these people scowling and defensive, he didn’t want to pull a wall up in front of himself whenever he walked into the choir room.  
  
What he _wanted_ was to make a transition. He wanted the people he loved to get used to the idea, and then plan double dates and theater meet-ups, just like they had with he and Blaine. He wanted excited conversations about the last competition of the year on the phone late at night. He wanted the comforts and support he'd relied on last year all over again, but with a different person on his arm, if that was how it had to be.  
  
No one was up for it. No one wanted to discuss much of anything with him that didn't involve why he chose Dave.

  
In pettiness, in anger, he liked to imagine them all grouped together in Rachel’s basement, preaching righteously about the troubled road he was on and how perfectly apt they all were, of course, to ‘save’ him from it.  
  
Confusion and protectiveness were coming at him from so many angles that Kurt eventually just adapted.  What was one more shield erected in front of him to walk through the world with?

  
Mercedes was, unsurprisingly, the one who disarmed him.  
  
When she invited him to coffee on a Friday evening, less than an hour after a long, low-spoken phone call with Dave, he went without his defenses. He was satisfied and comfortable, settled into himself. Being around her, the history he remembered when he saw her face, kept him in that place of comfort through one expensive refill after another. They talked in lines that collided with each other, wrapped around one another and had to be steered back on track time and again.

A friend and a conversation - they leeched the negativity out of him.  
  
The sun was a dull puddle on the horizon by the time she got around to asking. He knew it was coming by the meaningful expression she pulled down during a moment of sudden silence.  
  
“Kurt,” she began, plain-talking her way through the awkwardness, “What’s up with you and Karofsky?”  
  
When he hesitated, she amended a quick reminder, dictating, “This trust and honesty thing we’re supposed to have only works when it goes both ways.”  
  
He nodded, sat forward and folded his arms across the table. He was trying to muster the energy to spit out his usual evasions, but it was too late, he’d had too good a time and he didn’t feel like being anything but happy.  
  
His shoulders sagged under the weight of defeat, however intentional.  
  
“If we’re going to have this conversation, can we call him by his first name?”  
  
Mercedes lifted a palm in amiable agreement. “Fair enough.”  
  
“What do you want to know?”  
  
Simply, softly: “Are you two really dating?”  
  
“For about a month, now.”  
  
Her indecision on what to ask next was clear. Kurt couldn’t help but wonder if he’d developed such a reputation for uncooperativeness that he’d stunned her into silence by agreeing to talk about it. In the end, though, she had the same curiosity that everybody else did.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“For the same reason you date the people you date – we have a good time together, and we make each other happy. Is that not good enough?”  
  
“Not with him.”  
  
Kurt flicked his tongue out between his teeth and bit down on it; it prevented his eyes from rolling.  
  
“I’m sorry, but really, the way you’ve been acting - like we’re all out to get you, or something. I mean, were we supposed to celebrate?”  
  
“No,” he answered, hiding behind his delicate, needling tone. “No, I guess not. Maybe that’s why I wanted to keep it to myself.”  
  
Mercedes didn’t buy it. She never did. It was what separated her so distinctly from Rachel in his estimation, the thing that drew them back together even after months of unexplained tension – his attitude didn’t intimidate her, and his guilt trips rarely worked.  
  
“You know, you could do a lot worse than having friends who care about you,” she said, a blatant criticism of his behavior. “I wish you’d stop acting like we’re the ones who did something wrong."  
  
He considered whether or not there was a suitable defense to bat back, but settled instead on honesty, plaintive and tender.  
  
“I like him, Mercedes. He makes me happy. I don’t have the explanation you’re all waiting for. What he did last year isn't an issue, we dealt with it in our own way, in our own time. Now it’s your problem. Not mine.”  
  
Incredulity sat firm on her face. Even when she offered, “I _do_ want you to be happy,” he could hear the exception she was making in her head.  
  
“But?”  
  
“It’s just – do you think it’s smart, dating a guy like that? What if he hurt you?”  
  
“He won’t.”  
  
His confidence wasn’t enough for her. “What if he _did_?”  
  
Kurt gave an ugly little noise of discouragement. “Then I’d leave him. Okay? Does that make you feel better?”  
  
“No, I guess not. I don’t want you to get hurt in the first place.”  
  
Conversation shuddered to a stop after that, going nowhere. Claims had been staked. They weren’t going to alter each other.  
  
The parking lot was cooler when they left, clouds gathering overhead and headlights flaring in the low light. They said goodbye, held hands for a moment, then drifted to their respective cars four slots apart.  
  
Just before Kurt could slip inside and drive away, Mercedes shouted for his attention.  
  
From over the hood of her car, she asked, “Is he real good to you? All the time?”  
  
It was the first time he’d had a chance to talk about Dave and _smile._ He could’ve come across the lot and kissed her for giving it to him. Instead he went rigid with excitement and purpose, face creased with a grin that showed all his teeth, and said, “Yeah. He’s really, really good. Always.”  
  
Mercedes nodded, caught between dissatisfaction at the situation and relief at the answer. “Guess that’s all that matters, then.”  
  
“Well, that’s the dream,” he quipped back.  
  
“I want to support you. I wish I could feel good about this. But I don’t, and I’m not gonna lie and pretend I do. But I’m here, you know. To listen. If you want to talk.”  
  
Good enough for now, he supposed.


	3. Chapter 3

Whatever disapproval Kurt managed to improve upon in Mercedes that night, it was clear she’d tried to spread it to each of their friends in turn. School the following Monday was quiet. Awkwardness took up where invasive inquiry dropped out, but awkwardness was easier to handle. Awkwardness came before _transition,_ which was precisely what he wanted.  
  
Sam said nothing to him, but for the first time since their encounter in the hallway, he looked at Kurt when he entered the room - a pleasant look, capped with a smile. He’d avoided Kurt’s gaze for days, unsure what to say if conversation blossomed between them, but Monday’s Sam was a different Sam, one willing to take the risk.  
  
Kurt didn’t test him. The offer was enough, for now.  
  
It was Quinn’s demeanor he worried about. With Mercedes in the wings, pulling for his autonomy if not exactly for his relationship, she was the primary concern. The intensity of their summer dependence on each other had been short-lived, but it left him with such affection for her and the personas she armed herself with that the overlapping friendship became one of his most treasured daily interactions now that they were back in school.  
  
Something in Quinn's struggle for a self that was all her own lent a chill and grainy elegance to everything she did. She was never happy without a swarm of other, less palatable emotions underneath. He understood her.  
  
When she told him two weeks ago that he was making a mistake and he disregarded the warning, it set her firmly back in Classic Quinn territory. When she didn’t approve of a person’s behavior, she turned cold and aggressive against them until that behavior changed, and since her failed attempt at drawing an explanation for dating David out of him, their dynamic was frightfully similar to that of their first year in high school. She was impatient and angry, she bit at him with pointed comments when he talked in Glee Club - prompting two vicious arguments between them that Mr. Schuester needed to invade on for peace.  
  
Monday gave him no clues as to whether or not she’d spoken with Mercedes, or whether that conversation might’ve helped. She didn’t look at him, not even once, but she said nothing to combat him when he spoke, either. It could mean anything - that she was resigned to respectful silence, or that she had decided he was a lost cause and would freeze him out indefinitely.  
  
Either way, it resulted in a lingering incertitude that he carried with him all day, seemed to touch everyone he knew, then come back to him and bleed out again - everyone played off of one another’s silence in a never-ending and laughable cycle.  
  
By the time he was leaving his last class of the day, Kurt was exhausted of the reciprocal tongue biting.  
  
Dave’s fingers were a welcome distraction when they plucked him by the shirt sleeve as he left the classroom. He was animated and eager, something had excited him to the point of near-giddiness.  
  
“Explain,” Kurt demanded, straightening the wrinkle.  
  
“You won’t even,” Dave began, but a snort powered through him and he had to start over. Even staring down the barrel of a bad mood, Kurt loved to see him like this. Dave was so easily overwhelmed by humor. His whole face pinked with the energy it took, his skinny little eyebrows high and vulnerable across his forehead. Even his voice changed - Dave laughing was a vital component to Kurt’s attraction to him.  
  
Infected by his mirth, Kurt prompted him to continue. “Spit it out, Karofsky.”  
  
“Okay, okay - your brother, okay. He just tried to give me this intense ‘I’m watching you’ gesture? Jabbed _himself_ in the eye.”  
  
Kurt’s internal dialogue became briefly, thoughtlessly external, and he immediately soured again. That wasn’t the humorous anecdote he was hoping for. “Tool.”  
  
“I can officially die happy.” Dave was delighted by the fervor of Finn’s upset, by the dedication he gave to being angry (especially when anger sat so awkwardly on him). He wasn’t offended. He didn’t seem to understand that he should be.  
  
The differences between them were illuminated by stress. Dave was hooked into the humor, he dug up reasons to laugh. Kurt felt sunburned. It was wearing at him, eroding the layers; sand blowing across him sweep after sweep.  
  
As far as Kurt was concerned, that Finn tried to intimidate Dave to begin with was nothing more than another reason to be furious and tired.  He crashed dramatically against Dave’s chest, face wrinkling against his shirt. “Home now.”  
  
Rachel distinguished herself from the slow froth of students filing out the door and stopped short - was there nothing she couldn’t turn into a performance? Kurt felt himself go stiff all over. She could ruin their afternoon with the wrong approach. She could ruin every afternoon she ever thrust herself into with the wrong approach. Ten more seconds and they would have been down the hall and headed for freedom.  
  
She strained to greet them with a tight, pointed, “Hello.” Kurt recognized it as an effort to _show_ effort; she wanted him to know that she was trying, but it was just as important that he know she wasn’t happy about it.  
  
“Hey,” Dave answered, arms in the same lazy lock around Kurt. He was determined to be polite, and to make it look natural. “Heading home?”  
  
With a thick, unbearable primness, she said, “I am.”  
  
“Us, too,” was Kurt’s abrupt contribution - slightly less combative than, _I’m leaving, with him. Deal._  
  
Something else burned on her mouth. The atmosphere was cluttered with words she wasn’t saying, but were implied by the fact of her staying planted in front of them.  
  
Mercedes was the last blessed student out of the classroom, and she emerged just in time.  
  
She must’ve sniffed out the tension, the awkwardness of Rachel with her determined little legs stuck straight beneath her, unmoving, as though she could dissipate the apparition of Dave and Kurt’s relationship by staring at it long enough.  
  
She stood beside her, put a hand on her, smiled.  
  
“What are we talking about?”  
  
The neutrality of the question didn’t smudge what it meant - Mercedes was offering a reminder, if not a reprimand. Rachel softened the stab of a frown and relented. “Nothing, just leaving. We’re all just -- you know. Leaving.”  
  
“Amen,” Mercedes offered in agreement. “Walk me out.”  
  
Dave lifted a hand to wave at them after a short goodbye, still smiling, his arms and torso and neck all relaxed, resisting discomfort. Kurt wished it were a contagious trait. He’d have to ask him later where these reserves of patience were coming from, what it was about today that made the way people were reacting to him roll so easily off his shoulders.  
  
“They make me tired,” he said, watching the retreat of his friends and wondering how far away they’d be before he and Dave were on their lips.  
  
“They’re looking out for you. It’s sweet.”  
  
Kurt grimaced. “Stop that. We aren’t being nice. We don’t like them, today.”  
  
“Will we like them tomorrow?” Dave pressed his chin to the crown of Kurt’s head, fingers finding knots in his back and working at them absently. He had trouble committing himself to the conflict. Because they weren’t _his_ friends, because guilt still crept up on him when he least expected it, he couldn’t convince himself that he deserved to be angry. They did, no matter how little he wanted to say so or dwell on the subject.  
  
It was simpler, it was easier, it was safer to draw Kurt out of his ire with affection, try and reroute him back to the good mood he’d been in when Dave left him at the front of the school that morning by dropping a kiss on his neck.  
  
“No.”  
  
“What about the day after that?”  
  
The placating tonality of Dave’s voice beckoned out a side of Kurt that only lovers got to see, self-aware but spoiled, the Kurt that indulged his own immaturity like a sport. “No,” he pouted back, “Still don’t like them.”  
  
“Next week?”  
  
“Maybe. If they bring presents.”  
  
“Good to know you can be bought.”  
  
The nearness of Dave and the influence of his calm seeped into Kurt, and he let himself smile, bitterness diluted. “Have I not made that abundantly clear? I have catalogs if you need ideas. Stacks and stacks of catalogs.”  
  
Dave protested, “You’re not mad at me.”  
  
“Aim to keep it that way. Take the catalogs.”  
  
A gesture of hopeless submission shifted Dave’s shoulders; he played his part well.  
  
 _Fine_ , Kurt thought, _it’s fine. It’s better than it was last time, next time will be better than this._ So long as progress was being made, he could handle the slow speed with which it developed. He made a note to thank Mercedes later, for whatever hand she’d had in reducing the tension to at least a low simmer.  
  
===

  
Dave drove a Toyota Tacoma. It wasn’t the extended cab version, it ran on the middle-option engine with 150 horsepower, it was 16 years old and it came from an era that plagued Tacomas with tail light wiring harness malfunctions  - all information Kurt knew by heart, and he’d learned none of it from Dave.  
  
It was, in fact, the first thing he’d ever tried to impress Dave with.  
  
By virtue of a father who owned a garage, Kurt understood the basic features and functions of cars, especially those that Burt serviced the most. Trucks, minivans, family-sized sedans - the transportation of Lima. They were full of parts that were accessible to him in conversation.  
  
The first time Dave picked him up for something, Kurt noticed that his tail lights didn’t engage when he reversed.  
  
Kurt was at his greatest vulnerability to attraction when riding in a man’s passenger seat. Finn drove him home once before they were family, and he had to face the window to hide the hot, excited flush of his cheeks. Riding with Blaine back when Blaine was oblivious often sent him home hard, frustrated and embarrassed - feelings that could even reach out of memory and affect him again hours later.  
  
So much of a person’s self  lived in their car. He could think, looking around, ‘That is Finn’s day-old McDonald’s cup. He drank from that while going somewhere, stopping at red lights, taking in the day. Those are Blaine’s sunglasses; when it gets too bright for him, he pulls them from the mirror with one hand and shields his eyes with them, probably without thinking about it.’  
  
That day with Dave, because the cab of his truck was suspiciously tidy, it was the dull, dark orbs beneath the tailgate Kurt noticed, illuminating nothing.  
  
Swinging himself into the seat and buckling in, Kurt asked, “Did you know your tail lights are out?”  
  
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s up. I switched the bulbs the other day, thought maybe they’d blown out or something, but it didn’t help. They just stopped working.”  
  
Just like that, information given by summer afternoons spent dirty and sweating for extra money was called to the spotlight, and Kurt aligned the make, model and age of the truck he was in for an answer.  
  
“Oh. It’s a ‘96? They’re known for that. You need to replace your wiring harness.”  
  
It became of utmost importance that he not look at Dave. He could _feel_ the shift of his expression, the sudden intensity of his focus, and the faint undercurrent of humor. Humor or disbelief. In the struggle to keep himself aloof and detached, eyes on the road, Kurt realized he was trying to be impressive. The diagnosis of the problem was instinctive, but the way he enjoyed Dave’s dumbfounded lack of response . . . he’d done something to Dave’s estimation of him and wanted to enjoy it.  
  
The moment passed with reasonable success. Because Dave didn’t answer, or couldn’t decide how, Kurt prompted, “I can help you with the swap if you want.”  
  
If humor was behind his reaction, it took over when he smiled and said, “Okay. Okay, thanks,” as though there were a friendly challenge laying its terms between them.  
  
Then, just when Kurt was ready to relax on the high note and move on, Dave turned back to the wheel and said, “You’re pretty sexy when you talk like a mechanic.“  
  
It was not a flirtation. Kurt knew that it was not a flirtation. It was a joke - the neutral injection of pillow talk into conversation between friends; a mark of comfort, not desire.  
  
That didn’t prevent him from spending the rest of the ride rock-hard and helpless to the most perverse sexual fantasies the bed of a truck could conjure up in him.  
  
Now, a mild memory of that feeling was present every time Dave drove them anywhere. Today was no exception, climbing carefully into the passenger seat to avoid a sharp metal edge that stuck out after a wreck and shrugging off the day’s distractions in the safety of Dave’s personal space. He could sit a little closer to him, now, scooting their backpacks onto the floor and leaning across the seat to enjoy the warmth, and he could brazenly adjust the radio dials until he found a song he wanted to hear heedless of Dave’s chest heaving with irritation, but the reactions evoked by being in a man’s car were the same. Affection, arousal, interest in the person sitting next to him.  
  
And he was turning into such a good person. It sounded simple, but Kurt knew the effort it was taking. He hadn’t expected, a year ago, that he would grow to admire Dave Karofsky.  
  
“Feeling introspective?”  
  
Kurt sniffed out the tease in his tone and turned up his nose, wanting to bat back something loose and playful, but it wriggled away from him. He had something to say and no words with which to say it - needing to talk but knowing he would have to stumble his way through always made him uneasy. Precision with speech was one of the few natural weapons he had.  
  
“I appreciate what you’re doing at school,” he answered. “In case I forget to say it in the future.”  
  
“What I’m doing at school?”  
  
“You’re being very patient. With my friends.”  
  
Something in Dave turned self-conscious, but he didn’t make Kurt work to guess at its origin. “I want them to like me.”  
  
“I do, too.”  
  
Quiet came, they passed a handful of street signs, and quiet left again.  
  
“Do you think they will? Ever?”  
  
Kurt wanted to be reassuring, but he wanted more to be honest. Mercedes was the best case scenario, Quinn and Finn were the worst, and that’s exactly what he would have expected. Mercedes loved him, Finn was an idiot, and Quinn could be ruthless when she perceived a threat to her dominance. One of those minds would be easier than the others to change.  
  
“Maybe. I’d like to think I corner the market on stubbornness, but.” Then, as the thought occurred to him, “What happens if they don’t? You going to keep being patient?”  
  
Kurt’s primary role in the beginning of their friendship was to help David navigate his instability with anger. As a partner, he felt almost responsible for it, for not letting him forget that something unhealthy existed in him that needed caretaking and effort to manage. If Dave lost his temper, if he gave in to the bait being laid for him by Finn or let any needles of commentary stick under his skin and stoke his insecurities, Kurt would doubtlessly be involved in cleaning up the mess. And they would be right back where they started, alienated from his group, but with no chance of redemption.  
  
The last thing he wanted was to prove anybody right.  
  
“Totally.”  
  
Dave sounded confident, and Kurt had to pry.  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Totally. It’s different. It’s for you.”  
  
Kurt barked a little noise of disgust. “Shut _up._ Loser.”  
  
Dave laughed, so Kurt laughed, and again they stopped talking for a street or two.  
  
Even if he nailed it down with cynicism, flattery was always a safe bet with Kurt. He was touched by the distinction Dave made, by his belief that it was easier to keep himself in check because it mattered to Kurt that his friends accept him. It was a sweet gesture, unique to their dynamic. No one else could mimic it, because the ugly occasion of their first year knowing each other was essential to where they were now. The things he did to impress Kurt were never trivial. It wasn’t flowers, it wasn’t date night, it was difficult, painful self-analysis and improvement.  
  
Who else? Who else but Dave, who else but his Dave.

“Come home with me,” Kurt said, a lazy invitation. Burt was at work, Carole was at work, Finn didn’t want to see him. A prime opportunity to soak up more of this, more comfort, more admiration, more Dave.  
  
“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”  
  
Dave nodded, relaxed into the seat and dropped one hand from the steering wheel to find Kurt’s on the bench.


	4. Chapter 4

Coming home was all action and movement, kissing on the porch, tumbling through the door, toes catching on throw rugs and discarded shoes, shoulders rocking into the walls when they tripped and teeth colliding painfully before adjustments could be made.

It was restorative in its strength. The anxiety of a relationship beginning - being touched, having someone look at him in the hallways at school with a smile only he could decipher - soothed something in Kurt that he didn’t know existed until he started dating, and didn’t know could ache until losing Blaine.

Kurt couldn’t help but compare the two men he’d been with. Their separate expressions of physical things were so distinct. David kissed with hunger, wet and aggressive, he pressed Kurt between himself and the nearest solid surface and made a feast of him, hands broad and needy, clinging, fingers digging, vanishing up his shirt and groaning like an animal into his mouth.

Blaine kissed with an intimacy that made his knees weak, it was almost surgical. He felt knighted when they were alone. Blaine dissected him and laid out each little piece with such tenderness and care, fingers full of purpose, eyes blunt with love. They were vulnerable and adoring when they undressed for each other.

Blaine’s love was worshipful, reverent, intense. Dave’s was passionate, aggressive and playful.

He was grateful for the variation. The second man he loved had to be, in every way, the opposite of the first.

Tugged along through the empty house by Kurt’s demanding hand, Dave tried to catch glimpses of family photos and artifacts of his home life. He couldn’t imagine sharp, sarcastic Kurt as a child. Had he ever been silly, dirty in the yard, talking nonsense to his friends? Or had he come from the womb perfectly formed for derision and class, just waiting for his body to catch up with his mind? Dave was glad for the opportunity to look, but nervous about their progression up the stairs

“Are you sure I should be here?” He was not, however, too nervous to suck below Kurt’s jaw while he waited for an answer, ignoring the tangle their feet were becoming.

Kurt was laughing, excited, alive. “No one's home. And your room doesn’t exactly put me in the mood.”

“I resent that,” Dave told Kurt as they ascended, but he didn’t. Not at all. He’d grown more comfortable in his skin, less possessed of the hollow concern that admitting he was gay meant losing his personality; he’d changed next to nothing in how he lived after coming out, not the bedding with colors to represent his favorite hockey team, not the seaweed-grip of dirty clothes that littered his bedroom floor and certainly not the autographed poster of Metallica hanging over the bed, a treasured hand-me-down from his father’s first year of college.

Kurt was just as dishonest when he asserted back, “I resent that you’re dirty.” Familiar wordplay, a prompt. Dave couldn’t resist that word. Dirty meant _him_ , all over, candy to Kurt after working outdoors or spouting out filth when he joked with friends.

The door to Kurt’s room shut behind them and Kurt was quickly against it, eyes closed, lips apart. Dave pinned him there with all of that delicious, overwhelming weight. “I think you’re lying,” he panted into the crook of Kurt’s neck. He sucked the skin into his mouth and let it go. “I think you like that I’m dirty.”

For all the indiscretion at hand, Kurt was still what he’d consider a respectful son. He could be abrasive and unyielding, but when Burt gave an order, he rarely disobeyed. That was how their relationship worked – mutual respect.

The rule they’d established about being shut in his room with boyfriends wasn’t being broken without a minor squirm of guilt. He didn’t want the first memory he made with Dave to be one of childish rebellion, and something about Finn’s insistence that Burt would disapprove of the two of them together reached out from memory to discolor the moment. If they were going to butt heads over Dave, this wouldn’t be the most advantageous starting position.

But neither was the guilt entirely unwelcome. It felt good to worry at every little noise, and good to wonder how long they could steal, and to whine into Dave’s ear because he’d learned that he liked it. Being touched was enough, but like this, knowing he shouldn’t, it was better. It worked, it felt right, _so_ right, _right_ there; Dave knew to pay attention to a sweet little spot where Kurt's neck and collarbone connected while his broad, blunt palm eased inside a parting thigh, and it was _so, so_ good.

Guilt was receding quickly by the time Burt opened the door.

There was a scramble of bodies rocketing apart, followed by Burt’s laughter dusting across the room – not with genuine mirth, exactly, but not with malice or warning, either. When Kurt looked at him, he saw that he’d covered his eyes with one hand, and his head was turned toward the wall. He wanted to protect everyone involved from embarrassment. He didn’t know who he was protecting.

“Always a father’s favorite moment,” he said, a joke to soften the situation. The he reminded, a little less gently, “that’s why we have rules about this.”

If he’d kept his eyes covered, they would have had a similar conversation later, predictable and painless. Burt would ask, ‘ _Didn’t we have this talk, already_?’ Kurt would apologize and promise to be more considerate in the future, then sweeten him up by cooking dinner, or performing some other mundane household task that meant he cared, that he paid attention.

But he didn’t keep his eyes covered. He dropped his hand, expecting – what? Blaine, who he loved, back in Ohio and in need of congratulations before a reprimand? Someone he’d never met before, who he would need to educate on the level of respect he expected from his son’s partner? Whoever he thought he’d see standing there, it wasn’t Dave.

Kurt watched with awed appreciation for the suddenness of the change in his father’s face. He erased the self-effacing smile, the laugh lines, the air of welcome that hung heavier on him than his overalls, and he replaced them all with an acidic, malformed anger.

Dave was on his feet in an instant. He reached a hand out, palm bared in Burt’s direction; the universal request for calm.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Hummel," he said, hoping beyond hope that he sounded confident and respectful, but lousy with panic on the inside.

He meant to explain himself, to say that there should have been a real meeting between them and that they shouldn't have been closed in Kurt's bedroom alone - all those tired things a man is supposed to say when his lover's father catches them together for the first time.

But Burt aimed a single silencing finger at him, at his face, knife-like, and it wasn't a gesture that invited conversation.

"You," Burt punctuated lowly, voice level as the water in a pond, "Get the hell out of my house." The finger found Kurt, slack-lipped and awkward on the comforter. "You - downstairs. As soon as he's gone."

He didn’t wait to make sure they obeyed him. His feet burned with the need to be away from the situation, away from one more awkward talk, one more way his son - his stupid, stupid kid - was about to put himself in harm's way. This wasn't going to happen.

Dave offered a weak laugh to the silence that followed. "Scary guy."

"He's just upset, he’ll calm down. He always does." Kurt used the same stiff, certain words he always used when things went wrong, but Dave felt their transparency. His skin was pale, his eyes unfocused. Dave thought to himself, a little more in love than he’d been a minute ago, this must be the only thing Kurt couldn’t handle - fighting with his father.

He dropped a kiss on Kurt's temple, grabbed his shoulder and gave him a shake. "Sorry about this. Better luck next time, huh?"

Kurt rewarded the effort with a smile, but licked it off the minute Dave was gone.

 

The walk down to his father was treated with all the somber dread of a hospital visit. He wanted to get it over with, but his feet were resigned to a snail’s pace. He hallucinated a feeling of dust on his shoulders by the time he reached the ground floor.

Burt wasn’t on the sofa, hands folded together under his chin as usual, looking pensive and prepared for a battle of wills. That didn’t sit well – Burt often ordered Kurt to the living room when there was a discussion to be had because it was neutral territory, and he’d have a second to collect his thoughts as the parent before they began.

It took Kurt a second to adjust, to be alerted to the movement, to hear and feel and taste the oblivious urgency that was his father pacing in the kitchen. He wasn’t a pacer.

“Sorry, dad,” he said, crossing the room to stand by him. “I know the rules, it wasn’t, you know, a _plan_. It just happened. It won’t happen again.”

Burt’s lower lip went halfway into his mouth while he listened to the explanation, a gesture both of curiosity and disdain. When Kurt was quiet, he came out with the question like a gunshot: “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that I liked a guy,” he said, followed by a dismissive shrug. “We got carried away.”

Burt gestured at the front door as if Dave were still standing there, an intruder, oiling up their charming country foyer with his clothes. “That guy? The same lunatic who used to shove you around, threaten you? What do you like about him?”

It wasn’t an argument Kurt was unused to, but with Rachel or Finn, it was easier to step out of. His father’s opinion mattered in a way that no one else’s did. It was important he not misrepresent Dave, not fall back on the sarcasm he was so used to protecting himself with.

He explained slowly, tone heavy with forced patience. “It’s been a really long time, dad. Over a year. He isn’t like that anymore.”

Burt’s voice hardened into an impersonation. “’ _He promised me he’d change. It will never happen again. We’re going to counseling. It’s only when he drinks.’_ Christ, Kurt, even I know that song and dance is horseshit.”

“That ‘song and dance’ refers to grown men with -- I don't know, with problems! Things wrong in their heads. Not confused teenage boys whose primary concerns are football games and acne.”

“Those men all come from somewhere. Those men are all teenagers at some point.”

Kurt was dumbstruck by the insinuation. “What exactly are you afraid of? That Dave is a spousal abuser in training? That he’ll play nice with me through the rest of high school and college, just for the opportunity to hit me in the future? Not your best deductive work.”

Burt sparked at the insult. “ _Hey_ , I’m still the parent around here. You don’t get to talk to me like that.”

For as resistant as he was to condescension in his constant stab for independence, Kurt heeded the warning and quieted, attempting compassion instead. “I know you worry. And I know you’re supposed to. But at some point what’s best for me and what’s best for your peace of mind are going to stop being the same thing.”

Burt stayed on the attack. "So this is the kind of guy you're gonna be? A relationship ends, you lose all your self-respect, all your respect for me, that it?"

Kurt winced and his eyes lost focus, traveling to the refrigerator, the cupboard knobs, the window curtain, anything but Burt’s face. "Dad, come on."

"I'm serious. I don’t know what’s going on in your brain. You're supposed to be the rational one between us, remember? You're telling me, after everything he put you through, after everything he put _me_ through, that this is the guy you want? I don't even know who I'm looking at, if that's what you're telling me."

Offense slanted Kurt’s voice when he chastised, high and light, “ _Forgiving_ someone does not make me a _different person_ ,” but Burt did not relent.

“And let’s accept for a minute that you _don’t_ give a damn about yourself, what about the rest of us? Huh? How about a little family loyalty, Kurt? The money we spent, the honeymoon Carole didn’t get. For God’s sake, I was on Finn’s case for weeks for not protecting you! You know he tried karate after you went to Dalton? He felt like he let you down. He wanted to be a better brother to you. But he kept . . . falling asleep in his classes.”

Kurt noticed a sudden spot of warmth in Burt’s voice and saw the side of his mouth twist up to suggest a smile – he seized the opportunity. They’d laugh together at Finn’s good-natured failures and it would ease the tension between them, then the fight would stop, no one a winner.

He crafted the sound of laughter tentatively, but expected to hear it echoed back at him, relieving.

He’d never seen the coldness Burt returned to him before, not aimed like that, not aimed at _him_. The softness Finn’s memory inspired was gone, and Kurt felt the familiar crawl of jealousy under his skin. Since when was Finn the golden son?

“I’m telling you, you don’t know him.  He made a mistake, I forgave him, and that’s what matters.”

"I can't believe we’re having this discussion. We're not. It's over. You aren't dating that kid. End of story.”

Kurt bristled, moved back into himself by the familiar sound of someone telling him he couldn't have what he wanted. "At the risk of channeling the virgin starlet in every coming-of-age movie ever _made_ , you can't _tell_ me who to date."

"The hell I can't." Burt's face was as rigid as Kurt had ever seen it; he'd been cemented in his fury.

Kurt reacted with tone loaded, biting at his words, spitting them. "What are you going to do, follow me around school every day? We have two classes together this year. You can't exactly keep me from seeing him." 

“God damnit, kid, listen to yourself! This is not _you_ , this is not my son! Who the hell am I looking at? Why would you put this between us?”

Kurt tried to reassure himself through the unexpected hostility that this was the way they always danced. They would bicker and rage over a single point of conflict, one or the other would aim a retort too harshly, then they would buckle and initiate a truce. They would concede to each other's points, embrace, and reaffirm their loyalty to one another.

It was choreography, plain and simple, and well-practiced at that. Kurt relied on it. He relied on the two of them.

"Dad, please. I don't want to fight about this, okay? I'm dating him, I'm not running away to Europe with him, I’m not sprinting down the aisle or filling out adoption papers. But we _are_ going to be together. I need you to be . . . on my side, you know? I need you to be okay with it."

Burt was unmoved by the proposal for peace. He cracked open from the inside, gesturing with frantic fingers toward his temples where veins were straining. He was loud enough to hear fragments of in every room. "You have lost your fucking mind!”

_"Stop it.”_

Burt turned, one palm on the counter, the other rubbing a long, worried line across his scalp. This was too much. The future he saw was barely recognizable as belonging to his son, a battered, neglected joke played by this schoolyard psychopath.

He wanted to be protective, and he wanted to be a good father, but the bile and disgust building up made him too convinced of having been jilted, somehow. His decision was spoken in a huff of air, gentle but decisive. "Get out of here. Just go somewhere, go somewhere else, go to your room or something. I can't even look at you right now."

Kurt’s mouth was a tight white line. He'd never, not once, in all their butting of heads through the years, been told to leave in the middle of a fight. He hated himself as he said it, because it sounded so fucking childish and small, and he knew he was the injured party between them, not his father. “This isn’t how we deal with things."

But Burt was in no mood to honor traditions. He told the stove hood in front of him, "I mean it, Kurt. I've never _been_ so disappointed in you. I need some time to think, I need you away from me for a little while."

Kurt approached him, but he stopped short of a hand on his shoulder. He was crying before he realized he wanted to, warm, wet salt stinging down the place he'd been blushing just minutes ago. If he could ever get a handle on that reaction to stress, he’d be untouchable.

"This isn’t how we deal with things,” he said again, “We argue, we overreact, we admit we screwed up and . . . come on, dad." He sniffed, took in a breath, found Burt's knuckles on the counter and covered them. "Come on. Please."

"Kurt. Out."

  
He pretended it was only a mild offense. He pretended, even through tears. He pretended it didn't hurt as much as it did - it was a talent by now, he was better at it than finding the right key in song. "Fine. _Fine_.”


End file.
